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User: Arthur+B.

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  1. Re:300 million miles on California Legalizes Self Driving Cars · · Score: 1

    So what are they basing this on?

    According to http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx, the rate of fatal automobile accident in the US is about 1.11 fatal accident per 100 million vehicle mile.
    Assume the Google car's traveled distance between two fatal accident follows a Poisson law (that is there's a constant probability of having a fatal accident in a Google car for any mile traveled).

    Null hypothesis: the Google car has the same rate of accident as the U.S.
    The probability that the Google car given the null hypothesis has no fatal accident over 300,000,000 miles traveled is exp(-3.33) ~ 3.58%
    Thus the null hypothesis can be rejected with a p-value of 3.58%.

    To get a p-value 5%, the following would do:
    270M vehicle mile with 0 fatal accident
    430M vehicle mile with 1 fatal accident
    570M vehicle mile with 2 fatal accidents
    700M vehicle mile with 3 fatal accidents
    etc...

  2. 300 million miles on California Legalizes Self Driving Cars · · Score: 1

    3e8 car mile ~ 3000 cars * 1 year * 35 miles / hour * 8 hours / day * 365 days / year

    So if Google wants to reach that milestone, they need to start cranking out those self-driving cars.

  3. moon-stationary orbit, correct me if I'm wrong on LiftPort Wants To Build Space Elevator On the Moon By 2020 · · Score: 1

    google: ( ( lunar cycle / 2*pi)^2 * mass of the moon * gravitational constant )^(1/3)
    That's 429,000km .. 1.12x the earth moon distance. Uhhh

  4. Revealed preferences on How Long Do You Want To Live? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And yet, when those pills hit the market, they will all line up to buy it. This poll reveals how people think in "far mode". People enter "far mode" when contemplating events they assume are unlikely or distant in the future... far more is selfless, idealistic. Put the pill under their nose and you'll get a very different reaction.

    How do I know? Old people don't massively take their own life, people overwhemingly chose treatment when facing cancer, etc.

    It's soothing to imagine one's to be comfortable with death, it makes the whole prospect less absurd and cruel. This is just a protective form of denial, unfortunately, death-ism seriously hampers anti-aging research.

  5. Re:As the actual submitter I'll post my thought... on The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet · · Score: 1

    It's not funny if you explain it, but yes, that's the whole joke. The person I was replying to used "effect" incorrectly.

  6. Re:As the actual submitter I'll post my thought... on The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet · · Score: 3, Funny

    Porn only effects people when contraception fails

  7. Doesn't really answer the question on The Mathematics of 'Legitimate Rape' and Pregnancy · · Score: 1

    The statistics does tell us that pregnancy after rape isn't rare, but it doesn't fully answer the question raised at the beginning of the article. Ceteris paribus (that is, controlling for condom use, contraceptive use, day of the cycle, age, race, etc) is a woman less likely to get pregnant through rape. I don't think it *relevant* as far as the abortion debate goes, but I'm genuinely *curious*. One would expect an evolutionary arm race to have equipped women with some mechanism to avoid rape pregnancies and men with some counter measures to said mechanisms. I wonder who has the edge.

  8. Re:is it real on Man Physically Assaulted At McDonald's For Wearing Digital Eye Glasses · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Also based on my experience as a French citizen, I want to share that France is deeply culturally conservative. It is extremely frowned upon to deviate from the norm. To give you an idea, I once wore, for fun, a Fedora at my high-school in Paris. I had rocks thrown at me for that.

  9. Re:Sensor fusion on Ask Dr. Ramsey Faragher About Navigation/Positioning Technology · · Score: 1

    erratum:
    In order to combine all the sources of information, are you relying on a messy approach, something based on some classic machine learning algorithms (think boosting, SVNs, random forests etc) or are you writing an explicit generative model for the (trajectory, sensor output) and then apply filtering to it?

  10. Sensor fusion on Ask Dr. Ramsey Faragher About Navigation/Positioning Technology · · Score: 2

    In order to combine all the sources of information, are you relying on a messy approach, something based on many signature machine learning algorithms (think boosting, SVNs, random forests etc) or are you writing an explicit generative model for the noise and then applying filtering to it, with a particle filter for instance?

  11. Re:There's no such thing as random on Quantum Random Numbers · · Score: 1

    Mod up. The whole idea of collapse is that somehow quantum mechanics apply to particles but not to macro scale objects, it's violates Occam's razor.

  12. Conclusion on Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We live around 90% slouches who would rather waste thousand of hours in the future than take 10 minutes now to learn to use a piece software correctly. The same applies to touch typing, but also eating junk, shopping with a 20% APY credit, etc. High time preference leads to social decay. Now stay out of my lawn.

  13. Re:Mama don't..... on Friends Don't Let Geek Friends Work In Finance · · Score: 0

    Insightful? Really?

    During the financial crisis, it seems everyone became a self professed financial expert. This is not an insightful comment, this is barroom economics.

    "Bundle a bunch of bad loans". How? Do you know how a CDO is structured? What is a bad loan exactly? The word "bad" is assuming the consequent. What banks did was aggregate risky loans into structure product, and form tranches. This procedure allows investors with different risk appetite to essentially offer credit to risky borrowers. Yes, the modelling of CDO was poor, and the pumping of liquidity by the fed in the short term lending market didn't help, neither did the guarantee offered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for MBC.

    "Sell them claiming their good loans". To whom and how? It's not like the product was secretive or anything. Caveat emptor. Did it help that rating agencies are an oligopoly that prevented competitive rating of bond quality? Hell no! Does it mean that the banks had a sure fire way of making money? No!

    Bet money that they'll fail? You're probably referring to Goldman here.... hum funny but that didn't happen. How about reading the case?

    Laying off a bunch of worker so that the stock price jump? Wow that's magic. Why exactly the stock price jumps if you're laying worker obviously doesn't need an explanation, just a conceited approving nod I guess.

    Summary: if you don't know shit about finance, shut the fuck up.

  14. Re:What next? Cameras? on Visually Impaired Gamer Sues Sony · · Score: 1

    So the blind can read the sign and be sure its ok :)

  15. Re:Should have grown up in communist North Dakota on Student Loan Interest Rankles College Grads · · Score: 0, Troll

    "Neocon libertarianism"

    At least the libertarian support your right to smoke what you've been smoking. It seems to be good shit based on the crazy shit you're coming up with.

    P.S. I do not want to pay for your children college, FUCK OFF THIEF.

  16. Bullshit on Harvard's Robotic Bees Generate High-Tech Buzz · · Score: 1

    The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to mimic artificially the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony;

    Technically true, but the same can be achieved with far cheaper computer simulations. In fact I suspect said simulation would be run *before* said behavior is implemented in the pricey flying robots.

  17. Re:Odd amounts of money? on Man Accused of Really Liking Piggy Back Rides · · Score: 1

    Try to transfer $2,147,483,648

    Sure it takes a leap of faith, but imagine if it works ^^

  18. Bad summary on Bacteria Used To Make Radioactive Metals Inert · · Score: 1

    Summary says it "cleanses the radioactivity". No it doesn't. The bacteria makes the metal inert *chemically*.

  19. Re:Unschooling rocks on Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling" · · Score: 1

    Poor argument. People don't care only for their paycheck, otherwise they would be working much longer hours.

    Among other things, they care about status, and having no clue what your friends are talking about is bad. They care about impressing women and some knowledge is useful for this (*not* technical knowledge, *not* professional knowledge, *not* knowledge signaling immaturity)

  20. Unschooling rocks on Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling" · · Score: 1

    How many of us earn a living using skills they learned at school ? Certainly some of us do, but I bet a large fraction don't. I personally don't... my most marketable skills are computer science and statistics, I learned these by myself and never attended a course in these subjects.

    Reading and counting are the base curriculum, the rest should be left to follow one's interest.

  21. Heh on Doctorow On What Cloud Computing Is Really For · · Score: 1

    You can have free software in the cloud... open source webservices that can be run on any server, standards to communicate between different services etc.

  22. Re:Glasses? Nah... on Sony To Launch 3D TVs By Late 2010 · · Score: 1

    Hum I know the trick when you put a small object close to the focal point of a concave mirror and you see it appear somewhere else but you're starting with a 3d object in the first place here... how do they create the image ?

  23. Re:Glasses? Nah... on Sony To Launch 3D TVs By Late 2010 · · Score: 1

    Hum, WOW. I've seen one viewer stereo TV, but here they claim multiple viewers + some foreground against background parralax. Do you know what's the tech behind it ?

  24. Not 3d on Sony To Launch 3D TVs By Late 2010 · · Score: 1

    Hum, where did I put my pedant hat... hum not here, not here... ah there we go. Hum hum

    That's stereoscopic television, not 3d TV. I personally don't enjoy that much stereoscopic images, they don't look really believable to me. Stereoscopy is only one way we build a 3d model of our environment, the parallax created by our recent movements creates an accurate map too. Sure if you lose an eye, you'll have much poorer depth perception, but you won't lose it all. If you cover one eye, the world outside doesn't start looking like a TV image immediately... if you stay still for a long time it will, because you forget the parallax information you gathered.

    Look at the wii headtracking videos on youtube... even though you're looking at a video of a guy simulating 3d on a video screen, it'll look 3d.

    A real 3d TV would be holographic... it's waaay more complicated to make than movies this way. Rendering 3d animation in holographic format is doable but would require much more memory and rendering capabilities on the playback machine. The device is also much more complicated to build, but with 3 colored laser and a dlp system fine enough to change the phase of each pixel, it's doable.

    To the point... where's my holographic tv!!

  25. Re:Fuck you, employers on Apple Allegedly Sought Non-Poaching Deal With Palm · · Score: 1

    Law has nothing to do with it. Employees would just avoid the place.